Ambisonics in Reaper

hello everybody my name is michael wagner i teach at the westville college of media arts and design at drexel university in philadelphia and my specialties are digital media theory game design and immersive media in particular immersive audio in this video i would like to address one comment that was made most often as a result of my ambisonics videos and that was why didn't you use reaper uh things are so complicated in in ableton why don't we use reaper and that's actually a very good question now at the same time i also have to say that and anybody who is in the industry or kind of works with audio has came across that that particular kind of issue that uh the reaper community tends to be a little bit almost like a cult there's whenever you have a technical question the the first answer will always be uh just use reaper and that's interesting but it's also true to some extent so today what i would like to do is i would like to simply show how simple it is to set it up in reaper at the end of the video i'm also going to address why i used ableton or why somebody would like to use a different door even though it is much more complicated to set that up but if you're new to ambisonics and you want to get started then then most certainly reaper is an excellent option to to get to get going also a relatively cheap option to get things going so it's it's actually very inexpensive all things considered uh now before we get started and this video is probably not going to take a whole lot of time because once again things are relatively simple in reaper but before we we get things started i'd like to just kind of address a couple of pieces of software that you need um so first of all obviously you need reaper now if you've never came across ripa ripa is really what i would call a no-nonsense store if there's anything you want to do uh you can do that in reaper it's not going to look particularly pretty from a user experience perspective but it gets the job done so it is actually a fairly excellent tool uh and the the the second thing that you need is because reaper by itself doesn't really have any um tools that would allow us to work with ambisonics or convert things into ambisonics you need a plug-in suite that can take a stereo signal and turn it into an ambisonic signal now there are a couple of different options out there and that's actually one of the things that is highly interesting that you know kind of the the plug-ins that you get for turning stereo uh audio into ambisonics audio only comes in two different flavors it's either open source and free or it is extremely expensive uh and the reason for that is primarily that the people who work in that field come from two different disciplines and the first discipline is so from an academic perspective so there are many universities or researchers that work with that type of audio format and they especially when they have funded research uh quite often want to disseminate their their results in a easily accessible way so what they usually do is they provide an open source version of the software suite which is then picked up and and continued to be developed by by entire open source groups or you are on the professional end of things where people really rely on excellent customer support technical support where things are done in a way that i can completely rely on the software and that is usually very very expensive now there are a number of different options out there i'm just going to show you four that i found particularly interesting the first one and probably the and i'm going to place the links to this in the description so if you if you uh have never heard about these things uh just follow the links below now the most the most often used software suite uh is probably the iem plug-in suite i came out of an of a european research project uh the interesting thing about that plug-in suite is not only this is free but it's also seventh order so it's probably also the most complete package that you can get now a similar package is the sparta package also coming out of an european research project also seventh order ambisonics i have to say this is the one that i used least so i am not completely familiar with all the functionalities of this plug-in suit but i um i did use it once and i found it to be equally interesting as the iem suite so so this is probably a little bit of a preference uh depending on what type of functionality you want you want or or essentially how you you want it to look uh it's it's it is it there is not a huge difference between those two plug-in suites so just check them out and and pick whatever you find is more appropriate um which brings us to the more to the commercial versions a commercial version that i used a bit uh is are the ssa plugins a very nice developer i communicated in a couple of times very responsive from what i'm understanding this is a one person thing um coming out of out of the uk also seventh order um slightly expensive but you know kind of very very well done so i like those actually a lot and the final one which is probably the most professional solution uh is the suit from blue liberal sound now that uh has two things that are slightly different the first one is that it only goes up the third order so you're not going to get the additional orders from fourth to seventh order which which might be a disadvantage although quite honestly in a commercial environment we really go up higher than third order it's only when you're doing you know kind of research work or anything that's really more experimental that you need to go up to hire others in a commercial environment third order is perfectly fine um but what makes this uh plugins is really interesting is the the quality of the decoders it comes with a number of decoders or it actually doesn't come with a number of vehicles you can buy a couple of decoders that are really really excellent so for example if you want to set up a particular monitoring environment using a speaker system so let's say you have a dolby atmos speaker system and you want to turn it into an ambisonics mono returning system then uh blue ripple sound has an excellent decoder that that does an outstanding job in turning the ambisonic signal into an into a dolby atmos signal that you can then monitor on your dolby atmos uh in in the adobe atmos environment and even more so they have a software that allows you to take any speaker setup that you have so for for example one of the things that you can do and we actually did that at our university at some point you can pick up a number of very very cheap speakers active speakers and just distribute them in some way in your room and then you have you can take the ripple sound software and calculate a decoder run or run sort of an algorithm that will result in a decoder that you can use so that you can monitor your ambisonics uh in that particular speaker setup that you're setting up and that that works extremely well so that's one of the things that that this company or blue ripple sound is particularly known for it's not particularly inexpensive so you have to you have to be aware of that but it is really really really good and the final thing that we need obviously is the nx monitoring system now for most of these you technically don't really need it so you could use the built-in uh decoder um all of these solutions come with a decoder that turns the ambisonic signal back into a theory or binaural signal but if you want to get an immersive experience you need a head solution that can track your head and for the the nx system is still the best there are a couple of of solutions out there that use very cheap um tracking devices or trap tracking sensors that you can pick up on something like amazon or aliexpress um that are a little bit more do-it-yourself those can be really inexpensive but they don't really work as well i found at least as the as the nx system and the in the nx system is not particularly expensive either so those are the things that we need so let me get directly into reaper so i already opened up a an instance of reaper and and uh the nice thing about reba and ambisonics is that we don't really have to leave reaper so we everything that we're going to do is going to be within reaper there's nothing that we need to add not no cables we need to connect no additional software you need to run everything runs within reaper so let's get started so i'm going to just do a very very simple setup and for that all i'm going to do right now is i'm going to add a new instrument track and let's use a mono phonic let's use basil which is which is nice and actually let me use my headphones um so this is just the the basic sound we actually don't need much more than that right now now this is a stereo track or stereo yeah stereo track so the first thing that we need to do is we need to turn that into an ambisonics track and uh and reaper is capable of handling up to 64 channels which essentially means that we can use ambisonics up to order seven this by the way is also the reason why you get the software packages with seventh order because that's essentially what reaper can handle so even though we uh the waves plugin can only handle first order ambisonics why not use seventh order so let's do that um so the the the thing that we need to do is we need to turn the channel or the track actually into a 64 channel track so we're going into the um output the routing options and in the routing options we can specify the number of track channels and what we want to do is we want to have 64 of those now it's going to immediately come up with a different mixer now obviously currently we are only playing in the first two channels the other 62 channels are empty but that's going to change in a second so the second thing we need to do is the master track or the must the master track is essentially also currently only a stereo channel track so we need to turn it into an ambisonics track as well so we also need to change the number of channels on the master and in the very similar way track channels set that up to 64. and still nothing has changed because we are just monitoring the first two channels right uh so even though there are 64 of those in the in on the master only the first two actually going through my audio interface so so let's get started with doing some panning so what we need to do is we need to add a a panna to our to our instrument track and uh the one we're going to use is the iam let me just find that here quickly where is it iem and the stereo encoder and they come with a with a number of different plugins ranging from you know compressors reverbs all kinds of things and eqs obviously but we are not going to use all of them we're just going to use this theory encoder the steering code what it does is it takes a stereo signal and turns it into an ambisonic signal it's a 64 channel plug-in and it looks similar to what we had in the ambisonics for life so in the envelope for life system it's just essentially a panna where you can pan between the front back up down and and the three dimensions so if we now play if you remember essentially i now have depend on there what so what is currently doing is i have a mono signal and that monosignal is going to be converted into a into an ambisonics and because of the way the signal is set up only i'm only hearing uh something in the mono channel which in the ambisonics is the left channel right so that's essentially what i'm seeing and you already see that down here uh there's already a lot going on on the 64 channels because the different uh orders so that the channels on the different orders in the ambisonic signal some of them have but have a signal some of them don't and uh and and that is passed on so if we move that around currently nothing much is happening because essentially i don't have a decoder yet so after after putting on the the encoder on the instrument track we need to put the decoder on the master track and and for the decoder once again we could use the iem decoder but that would not allow us to track our head so so what we want to do is we want to use the the waves nx uh so let's just search for an x and there is the ambisonics it once again it doesn't really make any difference which one i choose i'm going to choose the uh four channel in two channel outboard version now what's going to happen now uh and we did that with the ambisonics for life tutorial it's going to open up the ambisonics so let me oops here we are let me just close that sorry so it's going to open up the i want this in the front it's going to open up the um the plugin which is the the decoder and it's going to open up the head tracker so the next thing we need to do is we need to connect the head tracker i already put that on the uh on my headphones and we need to connect that with the nx head tracking system so i'm turning that on so there's a light here that essentially starts blinking blue which means that this the device is not turned on and then we need to connect it with the head tracking system now i already said that in the last video that on a windows system that can be a little bit finicky now on a mac you will immediately see the head tracker popping up and by the way if you are on the mac it works exactly the same so this what we are doing today with reaper and ambisonics is completely identical on a mac and then on the windows system so we most likely need to connect the um most likely needs to connect the bluetooth device so at the device bluetooth so the nx tracker it does not automatically appear sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't i have not yet figured out when exactly it does well it started to appear no it doesn't okay so connecting okay and once again that can be a little finicky i found that i sometimes need to go back and and kind of click on the done thing here and then it will pop up okay so here it is the status is green so it's now tracking um i can see my heads tracking in the it actually kind of turned it let's let's put it back into full so i can see my my head tracking i might put the or might might define the sweet spot yeah sorry this is a little small but that's fine um i might define the sweet spot um so i'm looking right right ahead of me and click speed sweet spot and okay now i'm right so if i'm now playing a note i have that in front of me and as in the last video you are hearing exactly what i'm hearing in my headphones so if i'm turning my head to the right you have the signal on the left the signal on the right now by the way last time i said that the uh the um ambisonics panna or the ambisonic signal once the distance is encoded the uh the nx tracking system cannot decode the distance of the signal that's uh just the nature of the ambisonics file format however um as you see here it's it's trying to figure out the distance of the signal and the way it really does that is by trying to understand what the signal is really representing so for example if you have a particular signal that creates a certain reverb in a certain room then from that particular reverb you can deduct essentially how far that signal is away so because we don't really have any real-life signal that that distance here is just something that the nx system comes up with but if this would be a pure sine signal we would in the very same way in the we had in the last tutorial just see a dot here but since this is a essentially a a saturated signal or distorted signal essentially we see we see nyx is trying to identify a certain distance okay so if i am now moving the to the side right so i can and that's really it that's already it so so we are now we are set to go um um and we can start creating ambisonics that's how easy it actually is in reaper so i i do think that it's not completely unfounded that people kind of constantly point out that reaper is a good piece of software because most of the things that they do especially when it gets to more complex tasks are really easy to do in in reaper now um before i go into why you still wanna might wanna do that in something like evil let me just add one more comment here and that is it's also particularly easy in reaper to now uh print or render that audio because everything is that we just did is done in reaper itself in the door itself so all we really need to do is if you want to create the ambisonics the final ambisonics audio we need to just bounce it um now if you bounce it just be sure that you uh turn off the the the uh the decoding signal because you obviously don't want to have the decode the decoding plugin because you obviously don't want to have that decoded but essentially all you really need to do is if you render it um and i'm not going to do that here because i don't have any midi on my track but if you want to render just make sure that you render all channels and now if you if you click on the drop down it only goes up to eight but you can actually punch in 64 here uh and that will then essentially render all 64 channels and if i have some media in there or kind of have all kinds of things mixed and and once again have turned off the the vst that does the decoding um to make sure that i'm i'm not kind of kind of changing the the signal in a way that i don't want to i could simply click on render and it's going to bounce out a full seventh or the ambisonics file how beautiful is that now let me go back to the uh to the comment that i made about why you still might want to do that in a thing like evil and they're there really many of reasons and some of them are good some of them are not so good but most commonly the most important one really is that all of us have a feel a certain connection most of us let's put it that way and most of us feel a certain connection with the digital audio exhibition that has to do with the fact it's the one that we started kind of working with it's the one we learned how to produce audio it's it's it's the one that we spend a lot of time with and if you don't like what you're doing and if you don't like the software that you're using then you're most likely not really successful so so most of us have a certain emotional connection to a digital audio registration which sounds weird but that's the way it really is especially if you're not on a professional level right so if you're if you're somebody who is uh working for fun or uh semi professional and and uh and and really wants to enjoy what he or she is doing then obviously um essentially the door is important to you so um that with that also comes the the uh the reality that we are usually very good in one particular daw about but not necessarily in another one so switching from one to the next is not necessarily something that we want to do so so if you are a passionate ableton user uh it's it's just important to understand that essentially you can do ambisonics and ableton if you want to um but if you never use the door then certainly there are other options that might be more useful for you now there might other be other other reasons why you want to do something in evil and that has to do with the way ableton really works and um for me personally one of the things that was really appealing in terms of ableton is the session for you and the clip launcher so if you're doing some sort of real-time audio some indirect active experiences where you want to mix things on the fly in live performances then ableton is certainly better suited for that because because you can launch clips in in ways so it is it has its advantages some people also say that the automation in evolving is something they really enjoy it's really straightforward you you as long as soon as you click something the red automation line pops up and you just move things around and because in a uh when we plan out uh how three dimensional signals move around this the space uh it will quite often be necessary to work a lot with automation that can actually be an advantage so there are there are reasons why you still might want to do something things like that in in a software piece like like evil but it's certainly not the only one now this is essentially as far as i want to take it today um for the next couple of weeks what i'm planning on doing is uh turning my attention slightly away from ableton to something that is starting to really pop up quite a bit and that is dolby atmos i see a lot of professional studios converting especially if they're working with surround sound converting their environment into a dolby atmos setup and and all the atmos and a and ambisonics have some relationship with each other they are sort of both immersive media formats the main difference being that dolby atmos is more tied to a particular let's put it that way it's more connected to a particular speaker setup so it is in that sense a little bit more easy to understand what it actually is but at the same time what i found is that there's very little information about actually how to do that how to work with dolby atmos it's very technical usually so i i'd like to spend a couple of videos on kind of explaining how to produce in dolby atmos and for that we are going to move to a yet another door uh we're going to move to nuendo and the nice thing about noendo is that it's actually the first door that has the full dolby atmos setup included and that will allow us to use dolby atmos in in the box in ableton monitoring with with waves and x without any particular dolby atmos speaker setup and that's something that needs a couple of videos so that's what i want to do over the next couple of weeks and uh meanwhile if you have any questions drop me a note make a comment and do all the usual things that people do on youtube you know like subscribe whatever and see you next time

Channel: Michael G Wagner

Views: 4,201

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Id: fc5IXiR4KiQ

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021